Peggy Noonan -- Be Better People

So, on a rather unsavory anniversary in American history -- five years after the January 6, 2021 debacle (is there any good word to describe the assault on the Capitol, ... I don't know), I am thinking about the feeling of the country in which I was raised, and the feeling that seems to be the standard now. Specifically, a lack of decorum, of manners, of simple good behavior. 

Many people begin a new year with a resolution to simply be better people. I know I do. In fact, I have a long-standing mantra that this is the year of "the kinder, gentler Michael ... the kinder, gentler Mr. Mazenko." I know that I am too often quick to judge and criticize rather than listen and empathize, and that will always be a growth area. But, I do believe I am generally a good guy who tries to do the right thing. 

And that doesn't seem as common anymore. Maybe it never was, but ...

Anyway, I'm not the only one who has general behavior and the temperament of contemporary society on the mind. Peggy Noonan, a columnist extraordinaire for the Wall Street Journal recently published a piece which suggests, "We Could Use a Return to Gallantry - WSJ":

I don’t want to sum up the year, outline hopes for 2026, predict or warn. I want to say we all have to become better people.

You won’t get through the future without faith, you won’t get through life without courage, and if you want courage to spread (and you do—you’re safer in a braver world) you have to encourage it, give it a lift, give it style. That’s what gallantry is, courage’s style. Its class, its shine and burnish. As a virtue it is close to my heart.

We live in a culture of winners who must win, and if the others don’t know you won then you must tell them, over and over, like Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez. We are the wealthiest and most glamorous, we are living the best lives, Amal Clooney’s on line one, the Pope’s on hold. Are you not impressed?

Gallantry never says it won.

In Debates about the GOAT -- It's Always Jim Thorpe

Chuck Klosterman -- a favorite GenX music and pop culture writer -- has done it: he has written the perfect summation of what I have thought, said, asserted, and argued for many years when people talk about greatness in sports. In any discussion of "the GOAT," the answer is always Jim Thorpe.

Klosterman, in a superb piece of commentary for the New York Times, focuses specifically on the NFL and the game of football as he asserts: "Tom Brady Is Not the GOAT ".  That headline alone is designed to and is certain to generate immediate interest and criticism. But Klosterman is not deterred, nor should he be. While Tom Brady is almost undoubtedly the greatest NFL quarterback of all time (I do have a bit of a preference for Johnny Unitas, to be honest, but have mad respect for Brady and don't dispute his "GOAT-ness"), Jim Thorpe is untouchable as the greatest football player of all time.

To classify Tom Brady as the greatest football player of all time is among the least controversial assertions anyone can make about anything. It’s a subjective opinion accepted as objective truth: He played quarterback for 23 professional seasons, and if those 23 seasons were divided into three separate careers, all three might qualify for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He won six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots and a seventh with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He is the winningest player, the man who played the longest at an elite level, and the unthinking answer to this particular debate.

 ...

In other words, it’s the earliest incarnation of greatness still intimately related to all examples that follow. Which is why, despite so much evidence to the contrary, the greatest football player of all time is still Jim Thorpe, a Native American who retired from the game in 1928 and died when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. 

...

When evaluating someone like Jim Thorpe against someone like Tom Brady, it’s not enough to estimate how much Thorpe might have benefited from modern nutrition or how much Brady might have suffered if he’d been forced to grow up in rural Oklahoma before the invention of breakfast cereal. One must also consider how those differing environments would have caused them to understand almost every aspect of the material world in totally different ways. We don’t have video footage of Thorpe running the football. Such footage does not exist. Yet we know he was the greatest ball carrier of his era, and we know this era was when football (as we still understand it) came into being. 

But, I will take Klosterman's claim one step further to its obvious conclusion: Jim Thorpe is indisputably the greatest athlete of all time. Thorpe was an early twentieth century Native American athlete who won Olympic gold medals and played professional football, baseball, and basketball. The decathlon has long been considered the track and field sport (with ten events) that determines the top overall athlete. And when Thorpe competed in 1922, he won it as well as the classic pentathlon, which is a similar event of five events.

There is no comparable accomplishments -- elite performance at the Olympics and the three major professional sports -- in modern or contemporary history. Nor will there ever be again. So, it's clear, in terms of pure athletic prowess, Jim Thorpe is the GOAT -- the greatest athlete of all time.

Travel -- Where to Go in 2026

Travel is almost always the unanimous choice when people are asked what they would do if they had the freedom to do what they want. Usually, it's a question about retirement plans or a "what if" query about a fortuitous windfall like winning the lottery. As Robert Fulghum once noted in a quirky little essay he wrote about traveling, "nomads we are at heart, and we scratch the itch whenever we get a chance." 

Travel has been a constant in my life since late 1992 when I graduated college with few teaching prospects and little desire to settle into a thirty-year career in one place at that point in my life. So, my (future) wife and I moved to Taiwan, where we lived for five years, traveling quite a bit in between contracts and on any given week or so we could get a way. That inclination is also part of my kids' DNA -- my daughter recently returned from a semester abroad in Spain, and my son and his girlfriend seem to head abroad any time they can -- Ireland, Japan, Austria ... the international sauntering goes on.

2025 turned out to be a big travel year for us, though it began with one simple trip and grew from there. We spent a week in St. Maarten, traveled for a couple more around Washington, DC and the Chesapeake Bay area, jaunted off to Paris for the exquisite (and once in a lifetime) art exhibit and career retrospective on David Hockney at the Louis Vuitton Foundation (and unexpectedly ended up witnessing the final stage of the Tour de France as it rolled through Montmartre), and finished the summer with a trip to Boston and Concord for the Thoreau Society's Annual Gathering.

This year will likely not present as much varied travel, but will include a big move, as we wrap up our two years in FoCo and our near quarter-century in Colorado by relocating to the East Coast, likely in Maryland and the DC-Chesapeake Bay region. Baltimore in all its cool quirky fun has definitely caught our eye. So, with all that in mind, I thought I'd share the annual "52 Places to Go, So Little Time: Where We Went in 2025" from the New York Times. 

52 Places to Go, the Travel section’s annual list of recommended destinations, lands every January. Each short entry is a snapshot into a different possible adventure.

Some Travel editors were intrigued enough to design their own personal vacations around the list: Amy Virshup described staying in the inns atop Italy’s Dolomite Mountains known as rifugios as “otherworldly,” while Stephen Hiltner fondly recalls “ducking into a crowded izakaya during a torrential rain” in Osaka, Japan.

In 2025, a number of our writers and photographers also headed to destinations on this year’s list to dig even deeper into what makes them worth visiting.

Leaving New York -- Lena Dunham looks back and forward

The HBO show Girls was not written for me. 

But I did pay attention, especially as an educator and writer of cultural commentary. Because it was a show for the times as Millennials hit that fascinating stretch in life called the "twenty-somethings," -- and for the Echo-Boom kids the emergence of a weird sociological term called the quarter-life crisis -- I was intrigued enough to see how Lena Dunham's portrayal revealed the temperature and temperament of her generation the way shows like Sex in the City did for mine. And I did use some of the revelations in my writing for the next generation: 

In the first episode of the HBO show “Girls,” Hannah is fired from her unpaid internship, only to learn her replacement is actually being paid for the job. When she adamantly confronts her boss, he says, “Well, she knows Photoshop.” While Hannah may tell herself, “I can learn Photoshop,” the reality is she didn’t. Thus, the point is to advise kids to be the kind of person who learns Photoshop. Hannah is a classic example of a person waiting for passion to lead her to happiness — and it never happens. Successful people, by contrast, are the ones who work hard and do what needs to be done to get what they want and need.

So, I browsed with more than passing interest, Lena Dunham's new long-form New Yorker piece "Why I Broke Up with New York." 

It didn’t take long for me to grow into possibly the least adaptable native the city had ever seen. All good New Yorkers know that to live in, and love, the city takes a certain amount of chutzpah—you have to be ready, at a moment’s notice, to push your way through the throngs, shout your coffee order, rush to nab the last subway seat or the only on-duty cab. You have to be unsurprised by the consistent surprises that come with a new day in New Amsterdam. And you have to love it all, even if you pretend you don’t. My parents had both been raised far enough outside the city to have childhoods that could be called idyllic, but close enough that Manhattan exerted a strong pull. Getting to New York was their ultimate expression of self-determination, the place where they would shed preconceptions about who they were meant to be and create a new life among artists and experimental thinkers, planting their seeds in the fecund soil of the city. If we are to continue with the plant metaphor, I was more like an avocado pit mashed into a cup of dirt by an excited third grader who then forgot to water it. I never actually sprouted.

And, of course, readers of cultural commentary can't read Dunham's reflections without thinking of perhaps one of the greatest long-form essays on New York, the legendary Joan Didion's "Goodbye to All That." 

Anyone who’s completed the climb out of their early twenties hopefully has the wits to remember when life was as vivid as Kodachrome and the experience to recognize that perhaps all those new colors were duller than they seemed. Perspective, after all, is one of the great pleasures of getting older. But at the date of her death Thursday at the age of 87, Joan Didion’s 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That” remains the permanent sunspot obscuring the center-vision of many maturing writers even contemplating leaving a place like New York and telling other people about it. Only a great artist creates and ruins a genre at the same time. For millennial writers who grew into the body of essays, novels and literary journalism Didion already had waiting for them, it was like sitting down to grainy footage of a party that ended long before they would ever arrive.

So, yeah, Dunham's show was not written for me, but I understand its significance. And, to be honest, New York City is not for me either. Even though my son and many former classmates live there, and I can relate to the draw of life in the Big Apple, especially in your twenties, I like to think of the line from Chicago Tribune writer Mary Schmich's excellent piece "Wear Sunscreen." 

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.

The Punk on Walden Pond -- Art

“The Punk on Walden Pond” — mixed media, acrylic, paint pen, marker on canvas, 14x18” — the last painting of ‘25 or first of ‘26, this piece is my latest visual for the ongoing Walden Punk Project. Pretty happy with how it turned out.

2026 Arrives, Bringing an End to Stranger Things

Well, that's a wrap. 

The wild and weird year of 2025 exited last night, and with came an apropos ending to a strange stretch -- the series finale and end to Netflix's Stranger Things.  Millions of people tuned in on New Year's Eve to watch the final two-hour movie-length episode of a surprisingly popular sci-fi thriller that snuck onto the streaming television scene and into a nation's consciousness almost ten years ago. It's actually hard to believe that show arrived a decade ago, though the summer of 2016 could certainly be considered the beginning of "stranger things."

To watch the final episode with flashbacks to the young actors -- some of whom were barely out of elementary school when it started -- was kind of wild. And it was actually a bit of a head scratcher that Netflix managed to draw five seasons of a limited series over ten years. That said, it "strangely" made sense to see the characters age through high school and beyond as they battled to save themselves and the world from the Upside Down. 

If you're looking for a quick summation of everything you saw -- or maybe missed -- during the show's abnormally long run, NY Times writer Noel Murray has a piece explaining "What Happened in the Series Finale?" 

Worlds collide. Heroes die. The day is saved … but not without a little heartbreak. So ends “Stranger Things.”

After five seasons — spread across nearly 10 years — the “Stranger Things” creators Matt and Ross Duffer concluded their enormously popular Netflix show on Wednesday much the way they began it. Although the brothers’ budgets have gotten bigger, their aims have remained mostly the same: to tap into their core influences (Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, teen comedies and “Dungeons & Dragons”) and tell the story of a handful of brave young people in the 1980s, protecting their small town of Hawkins, Ind., from monsters.

In the two-hour series finale, titled “The Rightside Up,” the heroes are helped as always by their secret weapon: Jane (Millie Bobby Brown), a.k.a. Eleven, a teenager whose innate psychic abilities became supercharged when she was imprisoned in a secret government lab as a child. Thanks to Eleven, a group of Hawkins middle schoolers and high schoolers discovered the Upside Down, a shadow version of their town in another dimension, populated by dangerous beasts. 

As a fifty-something Gen Xer -- roughly the same as age as Stranger Things mom Winona Ryder -- I was drawn into the first season with its references to a 70s childhood era hooks like Dungeons & Dragons, and I enjoyed that first season. The interesting thing to me was how much the story reflected themes and structures of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And if you want to dive into critical analysis, you can certainly start connecting the story arcs to other archetypal stories -- Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter -- all rooted in Campbell's monomyth.  

While I did not tune in committedly for the entire run of the show, I did enjoy the wrap up last night, and hanging with my wife and two twenty-something kids, it was a rather low-key and satisfying way to ring out a strange year -- and strange ten years or so -- before we switched over to playing games, eating tiramisu, and enjoying some much-deserved and appreciated family time. 

So, here's to 2026, a fresh start and perhaps fewer strange things.

My FoCo Fellowship

Roughly a year and a half ago, I moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, to write.

It was a circuitous route to that moment in a rather topsy-turvy couple of years. In the summer of 2022 I went to Santa Fe for a week to do a weeklong conference at St. John's College (the Summer Classics program -- highly recommended, by the way.), and I hoped to begin working on a book idea I had, The Punk on Walden Pond, that I've been mentioning over the past year. It started with a short magazine piece for PopMatters and then became a conference paper delivered at the MPCA conference. Well, I did a fair bit of writing, but also just soaked up the arts scene in Santa Fe, ... and at the end of the summer I began looking for another writing opportunity, specifically a fellowship year.

So, the year of 2022-23 became kind of interesting when I discovered a couple fellowships and actually made it rather far in the process. Ultimately, while on Spring Break in Boston in March of '23, I learned the fellowship wasn't going to happen -- an opportunity that would have required an "early-ish" retirement from teaching. So, I rescinded my retirement plans, but the bug of an idea had been planted. And, then, on a little beach on the southern tip of Paros in the Mediterranean at a small cafe watching the sunset and sipping a fair amount of wine, I told my wife I wanted to wrap up my teaching career and pursue my book idea at an MFA program in Creative Writing. 

Needless to say, the 2023-24 school year was an interesting one that ultimately did not end with my admission to an MFA program, but did conclude with my retirement from teaching after thirty-two years in the classroom and school administration. Interestingly, about that time, I had begun a rather unexpected but engaging freelance music writing gig for Westword Magazine, Denver's alt-weekly. With no firm plans for our next step, my wife and I made a fortuitous trip to Fort Collins, CO, for FoCoMX, the "biggest little music festival in America," and that pretty much set our course. 

In FoCo, home to a thriving music scene and also the location of Colorado State University, I embarked on what I've been calling "my FoCo Fellowship," a year or so to immerse myself in my writing and my art and hopefully produce something worthwhile as part of what I deemed "The Walden Punk Project." The fall of '24 was actually a bit precarious and discombobulated for a variety of reasons, and I didn't really get a handle on what I was doing here. But after a warm and rejuvenating winter break with my family, I returned to CSU's Morgan library in early January (January 6 to be exact), and I pursued my writing and art project in earnest. 

Now, I am happy to announce that I have produced a decent first draft of a book about Henry Thoreau and the punk rock ethos, "viewing Thoreau through a punk lens while exploring punk's Thoreauvian roots." I am hoping to spend the spring putting a few chapters out there as journal or magazine articles and then begin pitching publishers on a book proposal. And, I will begin looking for my next gig on the East Coast where my wife and I will be moving in the summer of 2026. 

It's been a kind of wild and ultimately wonderful year during my "fellowship" in the cool, quirky, and quaint town of Fort Collins, and I'll be looking forward to whatever comes next.

Happy New Year. 

Todd Siler -- a Polymath Artist's new Denver Exhibit

Art knows no bounds, the saying goes. And apparently neither does an American multimedia artist, author, educator, and inventor Todd Siler. The artist and creative mind extraordinaire who was the first person to ever earn a PhD in visual arts from MIT had not been on my radar until recently when Denver freelance arts writer Ray Rinaldi profiled his new exhibit at southeast Denver's Museum of the Outdoor Arts:

On a purely visual level — looking at color, form, texture, materials — Todd Siler’s paintings, currently on display at the Museum of Outdoor Arts, are an astonishing array of eye-pleasing artworks. That is a good way to start talking about them — before you begin thinking more deeply about what they mean.

They are hyper-colorful, rendered in expressive reds, golds, greens and pinks. Siler lets these exaggerated hues crash into, over and around each other. Sometimes they appear like murky clouds caught in a brilliant sunset. At other times, they look like fire that has been captured mid-flame.

At their boldest, they take on an explosive aura, as if they are documenting the scene of two planets colliding in some mythical stratosphere and releasing all of the light and force that come with major celestial events. Yes, they have that much energy.

Siler's creativity and contributions to the arts, sciences, and of course, education truly know no bounds, and we are all the better for it.

Pop-Punk is not Dead -- Long Live Pop-Punk

So, Green Day is obviously punk. But what about Blink-182?

The issue and the discussion about punk vs pop-punk often has to do with the sound, the commercial accessibility, and the overall ethos of the musicians and scene in which the band operates. It all gets a bit pissy at times. I love the punk music and punk ethos of Husker Du and Bad Religion, and I have also always been a big fan of Blink-182. So, I really enjoyed a piece I read the other day from an excellent Substack newsletter Punk N' Coffee:

"Pop Punk Not Dead: the problem of fitting into the history of punk rock" 

Pop punk always seemed to enter the history of punk through a side door, when the discussion was already underway and someone had set the rules of the debate. It was never a genre that arrived with a solemn proclamation or an aesthetic designed to command respect. For years it was read as a lesser version, a commercial shortcut, an unnecessary deviation, as if accessibility were incompatible with any form of depth. That reading, however, says less about pop punk than about punk’s recurring need to define itself through opposition. Because if this subgenre made anything clear, it was that the youthful experience is not always expressed as organized confrontation or frontal collision. Sometimes it manifests as persistent confusion, as poorly articulated frustration, as the feeling of failing at something that isn’t even fully understood. 

Pop Culture is Culture, ... Isn't It?

Have we reached peak culture? Or did that ship sail long ago?

I've always been a pop culture hound, from consuming 1970s cartoons and sitcoms, amidst the rise of the blockbuster film, ie. Star Wars, to my career as an English teacher where I taught Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice as the original rom-com and introduced Henry Thoreau through the music and ethos of punk rock. So, to be alive in 2025, you might think I'd be as happy as a pig in slop amidst the constant saturation of popular culture. But I do wonder whether it's all just too much these days.

What is popular? And what is culture? And what is pop culture in a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century?

Jocelyn Novek, writing for the Associate Press takes a look back at the year 2025 and ponders "a ring for Taylor, an ill-timed kiss-cam, and something called 6-7":

Dictionaries define things. It’s their job. So when dictionary.com pronounced “6-7” as their 2025 word of the year, you’d think they would have, well, defined it. But no. “We’re all still trying to figure out exactly what it means,” they told us of this year’s “linguistic time capsule.”

But that’s just how pop culture works, isn’t it? Who’s to explain why parents alone in their cars were suddenly singing “up up up” from that “KPop Demon Hunters?” song? Or why, in the Venn diagram of pop culture and zoology, it was the capybara that emerged victorious and beloved? Goodbye, Moo Deng. You’re adorable, but so 2024.

Despite our new obsessions, though, some things remained constant — by which we mean Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, of course. It seems like every year gets bigger for Swift. But in 2025, she put a bow — or ring — on it with Travis Kelce, announcing “your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” As for Beyoncé, the musical goddess finally won that best album Grammy she long deserved — and, on tour, introduced a new force: her daughter, Blue Ivy.

So from the inexplicable to the familiar, here’s our annual, highly selective journey down pop culture memory lane:

Dave Berry & "The Year in Review"

Ah, yes ... the post holiday lull of late December. 

The days between Christmas Eve and New Years Day occupy a strange landscape of time in the middle of nowhere. And, it's these times that bring about reflection and contemplation. How are things? How've we been? Where are we going? I was struck by the blunt honesty of Nicholas Kristoff's annual "Best Year Yet Column," which he puts on hold for a year while he writes a column "In Which I Try to Cheer You Up." 

And he doesn't do a great job, ... which is sort of his point.

Which brings us to Dave Berry. Sometimes to the best thing to do is simply shake our heads and chuckle at the absurdity of it all. Berry, the humorist and whimsical social critic, has been rolling out his "Year in Review" for as long as I can recall reading the paper, and it is one of the most satisfying of traditions. Long writing for the Miami Herald and syndicated in the Washington Post, Berry's work was occasionally challenging to track down. At one time, his column appeared in most papers I read from the St. Louis Post Dispatch to the Chicago Tribune to the Denver Post. 

Now, in another sign of the times that I've written about before, he is making the column available on his Substack Newsletter. And it appears it's available for all readers, not just subscribers. So, if you're sitting around the living room with a cinnamon roll and a hot cup of coffee, sit back and enjoy:

Dave Barry's Year in Review 2025. 

The biggest story of 2025, to judge from the number of people who sent it to me, was this raccoon:

In case you somehow missed this story: In late November, this raccoon got into a state liquor store in Ashland, Va., by falling though the ceiling. Once inside, the raccoon ransacked the store, leaving a trail of broken bottles...

...and apparently consuming a large quantity of booze before passing out in the bathroom next to the toilet. That’s where the raccoon was found by a store employee, who called an animal-control officer, who took it to an animal shelter. When the raccoon finally sobered up, it was hired as director of security by the Louvre Museum.

No, seriously, it was released into the wild. But the photo went majorly viral, and the raccoon became a huge celebrity. We, the American people, LOVE this raccoon. And I think I know why: After the year we’ve been through, we can relate to it. We have had way too much of 2025; it has left us, as a nation, lying face-down on the floor of despair, between the wastebasket of stupidity and the commode of broken dreams.

How did we get here? Perhaps it will help (although I doubt it) if we look back on the events of this insane year, starting with...

JANUARY:

Sidney Awards -- Reading the world in Long Form Magazine Writing

I have always been a sucker for a good magazine piece, and I still can't get on a plane without a physical copy of a magazine. My traditional choices include Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, and other culture and lifestyle publications. However, I also appreciate the true long form ideas pieces in online magazines that have managed to survive the retraction of the industry. This morning's annual New York Times column from David Brooks that he titles "The Sidney Awards" got me thinking and tracking down some of these articles. Brooks invented the award to honor long form magazine writing:

Every year, I give out extremely nonlucrative prizes, in honor of the philosopher Sidney Hook, celebrating some of the best nonfiction essays of the year, especially the ones published in medium-size and small magazines. I figure this is a good time to take a step back from the Trump circus and read some broader reflections on life. The Sidneys are here to help.

Brooks is a humanities geek and classical liberal who voraciously consumes ideas-based writing and cultural journalism. Thus he regularly checks in with all sorts of journals and news magazines -- everything from Texas Monthly to Aeon Magazine. And that got me thinking about the more esoteric and less mainstream commercial magazine sites I check in with occasionally. Sites like Quillette which fashions itself as the place where "Free Thought Lives." 

Thinking about long form magazine writing reminded me of a quote from Generation X writer Douglas Coupland who started his writing career doing pieces for magazines like Wired. Coupland is an artist fascinated with contemporary pop culture, and he once reflected that he secretly wished to fall into a coma for a year, so that when he woke up, he would have a year's worth of pop culture writing to immerse himself in. It was such a quirky view, but honestly it was one I could relate to in some ways. 

However, Coupland realized in the mid-90s that his wish had actually come to fruition, as there was an almost daily deluge of new writing, more than anyone could read in a lifetime. These days, as I've noted in a couple other posts, the world of long form writing is more accessible than ever with the advent of Substack newsletters. And there are numerous online magazines that are finding ways to survive and even thrive in the saturated world of media. 

I enjoy checking in with sites such as:

The Drift: a Magazine of Culture, Politics, & Literature.