Amid Christmas grocery shopping, Clay reflects on the year that was.
Bismarck, North Dakota — I was standing in the grocery line, determining whether I could afford Christmas groceries — I may be reduced to goose, like the Cratchits of A Christmas Carol, who hope they will be able to afford a turkey next year — when I saw on the rack a copy of Time magazine’s The Year in Review. I love the major media’s year-in-review broadcasts and publications. These mattered more back when there was a comparative dearth of media, the time when we waited for the release of next year’s Information Please Almanac.
I brought it home. This morning I read it cover to cover. I lament that Time magazine, once central to American life, has faded from prominence. First published in 1923, Time has attracted some of the finest journalists in America over the years, and it was so powerful that political figures quailed at the possibility of getting on the wrong side of Henry Luce and his journalistic inheritors. It is still printed every week! That deserves an exclamation point.
I learned an amazing amount in reading through the 96-page issue. This made me a little ashamed of how ill-informed I was. There were, of course, the expected articles about Trump term II, about the endless saga of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking enterprise, about one of the best World Series of my lifetime (Dodgers vs. Blue Jays), about the death of Pope Francis and the election of the first American (Robert Francis Prevost) as Pope Leo XIV; about the grinding gruesome war in Ukraine, now in its fourth brutal year, including Russia’s kidnapping of 20,000 Ukrainian children (a war crime); about the Israel-generated famine in Gaza, which Israel denies in the face of reports from all the international aid organizations; and of course about the coming Era of AI. All that was to be expected.
Several scientific discoveries and breakthroughs thrilled me. Our newest super-telescope digital camera is 27 feet wide and imaging at 1,000 pictures per night, capturing some of the deepest, farthest objects in the universe. Scientists have confirmed that the Plague of Justinian (541-750 CE) was caused by the same bacterium that later brought the Black Plague (1346-1351). Interspecies organ transplants have begun to occur with some regularity, now that geneticists have altered pig cells and bred them to grow human-like kidneys. Why? Because we do 48,000 organ transplants per year in America, but there are 100,000 people on the national waiting list.
Here’s one that Mr. Jefferson would have found astounding and deeply satisfying. Scientists have essentially regenerated the formidable dire wolf, extinct for 10,000 years, from excavated dire wolf remains. They did so by rewriting the genetic code of the common gray wolf. Using this technology — which will only become more sophisticated — these scientists say they should be able to revive the dodo and the woolly mammoth, among other creatures. Jefferson, as fascinated by the idea of the mammoth as a 10-year-old today is of Tyrannosaurus Rex, would want one on the south lawn of Monticello (purchased on credit). Have they watched Jurassic Park? This belongs to the category of “what could go wrong?”
The human population of the Earth is now 8.1 billion. It was under 2 billion in the era of America’s Founding Fathers. 2024 was the hottest year on record, but 2025 will have been hotter.
The Louvre got robbed. America’s top biographer, Ron Chernow, published a not very remarkable biography of Mark Twain — I read it over the summer, 1,200 pages long and yet somehow Chernow missed Twain’s genius. The Trump administration went after the careers of late-night comedian-critics Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. Sean Diddy Combs was found guilty of two of the many sexual crimes he committed.
One of America’s top charlatans, George Santos, a member of Congress before he was expelled, then convicted of several serious crimes, might have spent seven years in federal prison in Fairton, New Jersey, but President Trump commuted his sentence. The president also pardoned the approximately 1,500 individuals who assaulted the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. And don’t forget the Chrisleys, Julie and Todd, reality TV stars convicted of tax evasion and bank fraud to the tune of millions. They were pardoned, too, I suppose, because they are reality TV stars.
The penny has been discontinued, partly because it costs 3.6 cents to mint. Ah, but the nickel costs more than 13 cents to make.
The year-end reviews always end with tributes to the fallen. This year, Robert Redford, Diane Keaton, David Lynch, Brian Wilson, Sly Stone (of Woodstock fame), Dick Cheney, former Supreme Court justice David Souter, Hulk Hogan (late of the Republican National Convention), Gene Hackman, boxer George Forman, Val Kilmer, Roberta Flack, actor Richard Chamberlain, Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards, Ozzy Osbourne, Jane Goodall, and lunar astronaut Jim Lovell. Only four astronauts who stood on the moon remain: Buzz Aldrin, David Scott, Charles Duke, and Harrison Schmitt. Of those who circled the moon but did not land, only one now remains: Fred Haise. The day is coming, and not very far into the future, when we will lose the last of the lunar astronauts, the last of the Beatles, the last of the World War II veterans (now at 45,000), and the last of the Holocaust survivors.
Meanwhile, the death of the American republic was widely predicted, but it hangs on in a perplexingly degraded state. It will be 250 years old come July.
And, oh yeah, Taylor Swift got engaged to Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.