The 2025 White Pages Awards

Your definitive guide to the heroes, villains and gas station pizza that made a year

What is this? Fair question. It’s a tradition. My thinking is that, for upwards of fifty weeks a year, I send off borderline preachy missives about how to relate to both the world and your neighbors. All well and good, but during this collective end-of-year fugue state, you deserve something other than me spouting off about how you should host a popsicles on the porch hang-out and how fighting fascism isn’t just about yelling your opinions more loudly.

If there’s a unifying theme to this list, it’s that a year (and a life) is made up of many things: The sacred and profane, I suppose, but mostly the ridiculous. It’s the kind of exercise that pairs well with holiday-addled brains. Maybe you read it now. Maybe you save it for a week from now, after you’ve watched your fill of movies about ecclesiastical murders or gangly blue aliens. There’s a paywall, but if you become a paid subscriber, not only do you get an exclusive playlist and a peak at the wildest school lunch poster I’ve ever seen, but you also get free merch (you’ll receive a link in your confirmation email to request). What a deal.

Ok, you want one earnest thought about 2025, before we get into nonsense? This year, the state of affairs was clearer than it’s ever been in my life. Powerful people acted both cruelly and stupidly. They made a mess of things, flailing about, trying to prove their own inevitability. We were threatened and sold to and presented with fakeness in abundance. And where does that leave us? As strong or as weak as our bonds to each other. Terrifying and blessed news, that.

This year, I tried to focus my life on community and care. I wasn’t alone. It felt like millions of us had the same epiphany. Every week, I learned about somebody else who was trying. When I count up the new webs of connection that I developed in 2025, it’s gloriously overwhelming. An unexpected echo chamber of imperfect hope and nascent effort. We are not out of the woods, but neither are we alone in the woods.

Thanks you all. Now let’s give out some awards.

Saddest attempt by a billionaire to suck up to a vainglorious autocrat and his rabid fans by wearing a silly chain and blubbering on about masculine energy.

If you fell into a coma on January 1st, woke up today, and were asked who won this category, you’d totally say Elon Musk, right? And I’d have to say, “no, all he did was completely break the government, snort a medically frightening level of Ketamine, and do a weird thing with a chain saw.” In, response, you’d no doubt have 5,790 follow up questions and I’d never get a chance to tell you that the answer was Mark Zuckerberg.

Best easy example of collective action that made me feel a million times less alone this past winter

Do you remember when I made a thousand or so “Musk and Trump Don’t Care About You” stickers and sent them across the country (especially to you all, people who kindly read these essays)? And then you put them up? Like outside the actual Alamo, for instance? I share this not to brag about the revolutionary power of my stickers. Babylon was not shouted down, adhesively, but like all the best things about this year they were tethers to each other. Pretty fun, too. You too could do something like this.

Commercial product that somehow did not (to my knowledge) cure the male loneliness epidemic

Thank you, “man on the go.” Before you came into my life I, a real man, wouldn’t dare use toiletries while traveling. That’s for girls, I thought. But you get me. I am on the go. And also a man. I’ve got man teeth, man hair, man armpits and man body parts that need to be wiped in the manner of a dude. And now I can attend to all of them, without risk that the other fellas on the Amtrak Hiawatha Line will call me a lady.

Worst President whose name and picture is definitely in far more of the Epstein Files than we’ll probably ever get to see

[REDACTED]

Best (simple! crowd pleasing!) potluck dish of the year

It’s about time I actually shared some useful potluck advice, don’t you think? Truth be told, I’m pretty pleased with all of my potluck offerings this year (various fruit salads, multiple seven layer dips, at least one lasagna, a now-forgotten casserole, and some no bake cookies), but just the other night I bought one of those twelve packs of King’s Hawaiian rolls, a jar of marinara, sliced provolone and some Beyond Beef meatballs. In the words of Emeril Lagasse and also multiple Warner Brothers cartoons: Bam! Vegetarian Meatball sliders. Put a little dipping cup of sauce in the middle of a serving plate and you’ve got a hit on your hand. I’m not including a picture, because meatball sliders aren’t that photogenic, but the people loved them, I swear.

School lunch of the year (“wait, is the Midwest a real place or is it just an elaborate prank” category).