Ben Guttmann
It’s been another big year – for me, this one dominated by a new baby and all that comes with it. As we near the end of list season, here’s a sampling of some things that I enjoyed in 2024.
If you want more, check out the good stuff from 2022 and 2023.
This was maybe the most delightful article I read this year. Some guy paid for one night at the New Yorker Hotel, then claimed he owned it for the next five years. It’s incredible.
Is this a good movie? Debatable. Is it a fun movie? Absolutely. There’s nothing quite like watching two giant kaiju duking it out on a big screen, and this was everything you wanted out of a mindless Godzilla movie. (Though if you want a better movie movie, watch last year’s Godzilla Minus One.)
Vampire Weekend has never missed, and this new album is no exception. I forgot how much I enjoyed it until a bunch of the tracks came back up through my Spotify Wrapped this month.
Once a year or so, I fall into a trap that sucks away a weekend: a game of Civilization. Reading the creator’s memoir was a fun look into the creative process that effectively spawned an entire industry. I’m a sucker for early computer history.
Is there life beyond Earth? I hope so. And I loved Jaime Green’s book about just that question.
My old iMac crapped out at the beginning of the year, so the Macbook Pro was upgraded to full-time desktop duty. I could have bought a cheaper monitor, but I’m glad I went for the fancy-smancy official Apple one – like all the stuff they make, it just works.
This Apple TV drama follows the whirlwind, eponymous manhunt to capture John Wilkes Booth in the days following his assassination of Abraham Lincoln. We were hooked from the get-go, and I was blown away by Tobias Menzies as Edwin Stanton.
If you haven’t heard of it, this little-known hidden gem is definitely worth checking out. It took us a long time to get to it, but I’m sure glad we did – The Sopranos is genuinely as good as it is made out to be.
It took nearly eight hours in the car to get into the path of the totality, but it was worth it. It’s as cosmically mind-blowing as people say, and I’ve found myself trying to plan a trip to catch another one soon.
Nothing hits as good as a hot dog during a 4AM layover in Reykjavik. If you ever find yourself on that cold little island, do yourself a favor and scarf one down from Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur.
You might remember Reply All, a wildly popular Gimlet Media podcast “about the internet” that ended in a little bit of chaos in 2022. Well, one of the co-hosts started a new show, a spiritual successor named Search Engine – and it also slaps.
We renovated our kitchen this spring, and we finally installed a functioning dishwasher as part of it. It’s amazing. (If you’re not from New York, you don’t realize how big of a deal this is.)
This full-length album from indie supergroup Fantastic Cat is just plain fun. Might be the album I enjoyed the most this year.
Having a baby (obviously) dominated our lives for the second half of the year. But one of the best decisions we made happened just a few minutes after the baby was born: to upgrade to a private recovery room at the hospital. It was not cheap, but it was worth the splurge to get just a little more sleep and a lot more space.
Once we got home, we realized that the rocking chair was now the most valuable piece of furniture in the apartment – but it was missing something. After two days of trying to juggle a baby, a bottle, and a device, we went to Amazon and ordered the cheapest TV and rolling stand we could find. For less than $200, this little TV moves all around the apartment with us and was the real MVP of maternity leave.
For the better part of four months, I manned the 2AM shift with the new baby. As I sat there, bleary-eyed, holding a bottle in front of that wheely-TV, I most often found myself tuning into the Antiques Roadshow streaming channel on Pluto. It was perfect: fairly monotone to avoid startling the newborn, and easy to pick up in the middle of an episode. Now I know a lot about 18th-century armoires.
This was the most fun the Yankees have been in years, and we watched a ton of games (again, maternity leave). It was a frustrating end against the Dodgers, but we loved following along through all the ups and downs. While losing Juan Soto to start this year’s free agency was a bummer too, I still think we might have an even better squad going into 2025.
Another excellent podcast. The always-great Jamie Loftus re-examines viral internet moments from years past, and the results are uniformly fun to listen to.
This year, there’s nobody whose stuff I found myself sharing more often than Jamelle Bouie. A New York Times columnist by day, and an excellent poster the rest of the time, Bouie is just a really smart, well-researched, and funny dude whose takes I nearly always agree with.
I probably couldn’t tell you the names of more than one or two video games that came out this year. But I can tell you that I enjoyed a brief, nostalgic stint revisiting the 25-year-old Age of Empires II a few months ago.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner writes sentences so good they make you mad that you didn’t write them. The author of Fleishman is in Trouble’s second book is a captivating and funny tale of family, wealth, suburbia, crime, neuroticism, 20th-century Judaism, and everything in between. Probably my favorite book of the year.
It feels like this was the year that a good chunk of my social life consolidated into a handful of WhatsApp Groups. As social networks continue to fade away, it’s nice to have this outlet sprout up in their place.
This was the single best piece of baby gear we got. The Doona is a car seat that unfolds into a stroller, and it’s perfect. It’s a little pricey, but every new parent should get one of these.
Finally, an excellent bakery in Sunnyside! The bread is delicious, and the donuts are incredible – but the star of the show are the conchas, arguably better than any I’ve ever had in Mexico.
