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      Year in Review

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      As critics issue their year-end lists, we want to know your personal favorites of 2024.It’s the most wonderful time of year, and I don’t mean the holiday season, although I’ve heard that people are excited about that too. No, for nerds like me who love to plan out their holiday culture consumption — those whose appetites are always far larger than their capacity for viewing/reading/listening — December is sacred because it is when critics issue their retrospective best-of lists, their verdicts on the best movies, music, TV, books and other cultural artifacts of 2024.I’ve always thought it a shame that everyone I know doesn’t issue a best-of list. Yes, critics are experts in their fields, completists who have surveyed the landscape of their beats such that their assessments of “the best” are far more informed than the average cultural consumer’s. But I also want to know what my friends and family loved, and why. There’s no easier way to get to know someone a little bit more deeply than by asking them for a recommendation. I have a fantasy of pulling out a bullhorn on my morning commute and asking everyone in my subway car their top five films of the year. I’m not sure anyone would play along with my reindeer game, but if they did, I expect that I’d get a few good recs, some truly nutty ones, and that it would certainly bring a spirit of joy and conviviality to a typically alienating part of the day.And why stop at the usual categories? Best-of lists are typically limited to the same categories. Tell me your favorite movie, book and song, but I also want to know the best line of poetry you read this year, the best cocktail you devised, the best tradition you started, the best grilling technique, the best piece of advice you received. We’re all living and exploring and absorbing.And so I ask you, as I do every year, to send in your own highly specific, idiosyncratic, genre-free favorites from 2024. What did you discover? What did you learn? What did you love? Submit your answers here, and I’ll include as many of them as I can in upcoming newsletters.For moreThe Morning readers’ bests of 2023 and 2022.The best advice Morning readers received in 2023 and 2022.“As with everything worth making — bread, sweet love, mix tapes — there’s an art to creating a great Top 10 list.” From 2011, Dan Kois on how and why to make a best-of list.The Times’s best of 2024 lists.More year-end lists from around the internet.THE WEEK IN CULTUREFilm and TVAmy Adams in a scene from “Nightbitch.”Searchlight Pictures, via Associated Press“Nightbitch,” which stars Amy Adams as a stay-at-home mother who turns into a feral dog, is one of the movies Times critics are talking about this week.“The Agency” on Paramount + and Netflix’s “Black Doves” are part of a new crop of spy dramas whose biggest battles take place within the hearts and minds of their agents.ArtThe discovery of a rare picture of the poet Arthur Rimbaud, made by his lover Paul Verlaine, prompted a bidding war in Paris.At New York’s Grolier Club, an exhibition renders physical representations of lost or unfinished works by writers including Ernest Hemingway and Christopher Marlowe.More CultureJean-Charles de CastelbajacAlain Jocard/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Notre-Dame Cathedral reopens, the clergy will be wearing new liturgical garb designed by the French designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.The most expensive dinosaur fossil ever sold at auction — a stegosaurus that went for almost $45 million — has a new home at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.The two remaining defendants in the case against Young Thug’s rap label YSL were found not guilty of murder and gang charges.THE LATEST NEWSWar in SyriaRebel fighters in the streets of Hama on Friday.Bakr Al Kassem/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRebels fighting to depose Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, advanced on another major city en route to the capital. The sudden intensification of the war has led neighboring countries to close their borders.Iran, which for years has helped Assad maintain control of Syria, is now evacuating military personnel from the country.The leader of Syria’s rebel groups told The Times that he was confident his fighters could oust Assad. “This operation broke the enemy,” he said.Other Big StoriesA vote on whether to impeach South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, slowed to a crawl as the opposition tried to convince members of his party to support the ouster of the president.A federal judge ruled that the U.S. Naval Academy can consider race and ethnicity in admissions, asserting that affirmative action was essential to protect national security.A panel of federal judges upheld a law that would ban TikTok in the U.S. unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sells the app. Donald Trump opposes the ban.The U.S. Department of Agriculture will begin testing the nation’s milk supply for the bird flu virus.Police officers now believe the man who shot the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare in Manhattan escaped from the city that day. Investigators recovered a backpack in Central Park similar to the one he was carrying.CULTURE CALENDAR📺 “Somebody Somewhere” (Sunday): In the second season of this HBO half-hour, a character graces a potluck with St. Louis sushi, a delicacy that combines ham, pickles and cream cheese. It’s delicious. And tough on the gut. That’s also true of this riotously funny, achingly tender comedy created by Hannah Bos, Paul Thureen and Bridget Everett. Everett stars as Sam, a woman who returns in middle age to her Manhattan, Kan., hometown. A sweet and salty heartbreaker about family found and chosen, this show will end its three-season run on Sunday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Year Among My Fellow Banned Writers

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      This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.Turning Point: More than 10,000 books were targeted for removal from school shelves in the United States in the 2023-2024 academic year.As a kid, I cataloged the books I read each year in a three-ring notebook. I read lots of books, not all of them favorites, but I was proud to read and review each one for my own pleasure, from fairy tales to books on the lives of saints. Even if I didn’t like a tome, I read it anyway. Every book will teach you something, if you let it.Now, as I near 70 years of age, I’ve made it a goal to read books that have recently been targeted for bans in South Texas public schools. In the spring, a church group approached school boards in the Rio Grande Valley and brought certain titles to their attention, saying that some of the content in the books was “extremely vulgar and offensive.” The group specified reasons for requesting each book’s expulsion, though some of the themes it cited — sexual abuse and parental violence — are also found in the pages of the Bible, which could also be labeled offensive if not read in context. The church group didn’t use the word “ban” — they preferred that officials “willingly remove” these books. This raised my curiosity.Earlier this year I thought I would make the group’s list my summer reading project, but with 676 titles to get through, I had to extend my goal beyond one season.A display featuring books that have faced bans at The Lynx bookstore in Gainesville, Fla. Lauren Groff, the best-selling author, and her husband had toyed with the idea of opening The Lynx for more than a decade and said that mounting bans and challenges to books, particularly in Florida, pushed them to do it.Dustin Miller for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The 10 Best Books of 2024

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      Here they are — the 10 Best Books of 2024.At the Book Review, we spend all year getting ready for this moment. We begin debating our annual best-of list in the spring, going to the mat for what we love. By fall, we’re preparing for rhetorical slugfests.Ultimately, we aim to pick the books that made lasting impressions: the stories that imprinted on our hearts and psyches, the examining of lives that deepened what we thought we already knew.We break down three of these picks in a handy video. For even more great books, take a spin through all 100 Notable Books of 2024, or even this list, which features every book we’ve anointed the best since 2000.FictionAll FoursBy Miranda JulyJuly’s second novel, which follows a married mother and artist who derails a solo cross-country road trip by checking into a motel close to home and starting an affair with a younger rental-car worker, was the year’s literary conversation piece, dubbed “the talk of every group text — at least every group text composed of women over 40” and “the first great perimenopause novel” in just two of many articles that wrestled with its themes. Sexually frank and laced with the novelist’s loopy humor, the book ends up posing that most universal question: What would you risk to change your life? Read our review.Local bookstores | Barnes and Noble | Amazon | AppleWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Test Yourself on These Young Adult Novels Adapted Into Films

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      Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. This week’s challenge is focused on tween and teen novels that made the leap from the page to the screen — and some of them more than once.Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their movie versions.3 of 5This 1972 middle-grade novel by Mary Rodgers has been adapted for the screen in 1976, 1995, 2003 and 2018, and its various productions over the years have starred Lindsay Lohan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Heidi Blickenstaff and Jodie Foster, among others. What is the title of the book? More

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      Hal Lindsey, Author of ‘The Late, Great Planet Earth,’ Dies at 95

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      In that 1970 book and others he wrote of history and apocalyptic predictions based on biblical interpretations and actual events of the time.Hal Lindsey, a onetime Mississippi Delta tugboat captain who became a campus preacher and improbably vaulted to fame and riches by writing that the world would soon end with natural catastrophes and ruinous wars, followed by the return of Jesus Christ, died on Monday at his home. He was 95.His death was announced on his website. The announcement did not specify where he lived.Mr. Lindsey took the book world by storm with “The Late, Great Planet Earth,” released in 1970 by Zondervan, a small religious publisher in Grand Rapids, Mich. Written with C.C. Carlson (some Lindsey followers said it was ghostwritten by her), the book is a breezy blend of history and apocalyptic predictions based on biblical interpretations and actual events of the time.An editor at Bantam Books thought the book, Mr. Lindsey’s first, had sales potential, so she acquired the mass-market paperback rights. “The Late, Great Planet Earth” became the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s. By some estimates, it sold around 35 million copies by 1999, and was translated into about 50 languages.If you are reading this, Mr. Lindsey’s doomsday predictions have not come true, and his prophesies of imminent end-of-the-world events seem less credible with each passing day. Yet Mr. Lindsey was indeed a harbinger — of a movement he helped create.“Hal Lindsey is one of the most fascinating figures in the whole history of contemporary prophecy belief,” Paul S. Boyer, a historian who specialized in the role of religion in American life, wrote several years before his own death in 2012. While Mr. Boyer saw the book as neither profound nor truly avant-garde, he wrote that its author “represents another one of those moments of breakthrough, when interest in Bible prophecy spills out beyond just the ranks of the true believers and becomes a broader cultural phenomenon.”The Middle East, and Israel in particular, were central to Mr. Lindsey’s predictions. “The Late, Great Planet Earth” was published just three years after Israel’s triumph in the Six-Day War of June 1967. Mr. Lindsey was on safe ground in predicting that Israel’s victory would not bring peace, but he envisioned events far worse than the violence and tensions that plague the region.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      J. Stanley Pottinger, 84, Dies; Official Figured Out Identity of ‘Deep Throat’

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      A former Nixon official (and later a novelist), he led an investigation in which a shadowy Watergate figure squirmed when asked if he had been an anonymous whistle blower.J. Stanley Pottinger, who as a high-ranking figure in the Department of Justice during the 1970s was probably the only person in government to figure out the identity of Deep Throat, the pseudonymous man who provided critical information to reporters in the Watergate scandal, died on Wednesday in Princeton, N.J. He was 84.His son Matt said the death, at a hospital, was from cancer. Mr. Pottinger, who went on to become a best-selling novelist, lived in South Salem, N.Y., but was in Princeton to be near the home of his daughter, Katie Pottinger.Mr. Pottinger (pronounced POT-in-jer) served as the top civil-rights official in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and in the Department of Justice under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. In early 1977, Jimmy Carter, the incoming president, asked him to stay on to lead a grand jury investigation into illegal break-ins by the F.B.I.During the testimony of W. Mark Felt, who had been the bureau’s deputy director under Nixon, a juror asked him, offhand, if he was the one who had guided the journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their investigation into White House ties to a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington.Mr. Pottinger was standing next to Mr. Felt, and saw his face go pale.Mr. Felt asked him to repeat the question.Mr. Pottinger asked if he was Deep Throat.Mr. Felt said no, but haltingly.“I knew right away from his demeanor that he was Deep Throat,” Mr. Pottinger told The New York Observer in 2005.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ Author Wants Us to Give Thanks Every Day

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      The world is a gift, not a giant Amazon warehouse, Robin Wall Kimmerer said. In her new book, “The Serviceberry,” she proposes gratitude as an antidote to prevailing views of nature as a commodity.Every summer, the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer takes a group of students on a two-week field trip deep into the woods and bogs of the Adirondacks.For their final exam, students prepare a feast from foraged plants, dining on a wild menu of boiled cattail kebabs, roasted rhizomes, stir-fried day lily buds, lichen noodles in a gelatinous broth of boiled rock tripe. For dessert there are serviceberry and cattail pollen pancakes, smothered in pine-scented spruce needle syrup.Before digging in, the group recites the Thanksgiving address — an invocation within Indigenous Haudenosaunee communities that gives thanks to the earth and its abundance.“We start the class with a Thanksgiving address to share our sense of gratitude for the plants, and we end the same way,” said Kimmerer, a professor of environmental biology at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, who is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. “So we learn about the gifts of plants and how to receive them.”Kimmerer often says that plants have been her teachers throughout her life. As a little girl, she stashed shoe boxes of pressed leaves and seeds under her bed. Later, as a young botanist, she studied the mysteries of moss reproduction. Throughout her decades of research and environmental advocacy, as she’s pushed to bring Indigenous knowledge into ecological conservation work, she’s learned about the delicate web of relationships between plants and their surroundings.Now, as a renowned plant ecologist and best-selling author, Kimmerer is teaching millions of people how to learn from plants.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Books About Everyone, for Everyone

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      This is part of an Opinion series on The New York Times Communities Fund, which assists nonprofits that provide direct support to people and communities facing hardship. Donate to the fund here. .g-goldbergseriesinfo a { text-decoration: underline; color: inherit; text-decoration-thickness: 1px; text-underline-offset: 2px; } .g-goldbergseriesinfo{ position: relative; display: flex; overflow: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1.125rem […] More