Dec

19

2025

Mari Cohen (Senior Editor, Politics): A month ago, I finally canceled my Spotify subscription. For a few years, I’d already felt unsettled about supporting a company known for its paltry payments to artists and shady schemes to pad the platform with mass-produced content under the name of “ghost artists.” When Spotify’s CEO made a major investment in an AI military tech company and then the platform began running ICE ads earlier this year, I realized it was time to cancel the family plan I maintained, write them a sternly worded explanation, and move over to Apple Music. I’m not under much illusion that Apple is a particularly ethical company to support either, but at moments when a just consumer boycott is cohering, despairing over how every alternative is compromised can become an excuse to do nothing. So I feel good about making the choice to move to a slightly better option—one that I actually used to use until peer pressure pushed me over to Spotify seven years ago. (Doesn’t hurt that I was able to transfer all my playlists, too.) It’s taking a bit of time to re-familiarize myself with the Apple Music interface, but I can’t say I particularly miss Spotify’s uncanny AI-generated personalized playlist titles or its repetitive recommendations. So with that preamble out of the way, I’m happy to present my annual playlist of my favorite songs released during the year, courtesy of Apple Music.

This year, my favorite album was largely overlooked by major year-end lists. I couldn’t stop listening to the impeccable melodies and emotional vocals on Bloodless by indie singer-songwriter Samia. The more widely recognized Bleeds by Wednesday made for my close second: Frontwoman Karly Hartzman knows how to transform intricate evocations of Southern life into catchy hooks—and she’s not afraid to scream them when necessary. Meanwhile, if Lorde’s limp 2021 offering Solar Power was a disappointment, I found this year’s Virgin to be a return to form, an album that can light up headphones or a dance floor, with a thematic depth still rare in the megapop world. (If you get a chance to see the Ultrasound tour, don’t hesitate—Lorde’s spare, artsy tour production drew me all the way in from the highest spot in the balcony.)

Don’t worry, I also liked a few albums by men, including Southern rock king Jason Isbell’s Foxes in the Snow, which I’ve already extolled in this newsletter, as well as the blues-inflected rock and political poetry on Greg Freeman’s Burnover. The playlist also heavily features selections from Spanish pop star Rosalía’s operatic tour-de-force Lux, as well as the whispery but energetic stylings of her countrywomen AMORE (Top Hits, Ballads, Etc...); the miraculous reunion of Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield with twin sister Allison on Snocaps, bringing back the grungier rock sound of my favorite Waxahatchee record Out of the Storm with the help of MJ Lenderman on guitar; the audacious and addicting power pop tunes on Blondshell’s If You Asked for a Picture; the many permutations (two different versions with two different track lists, plus a b-sides release) of fka twigs’s experimental dance pop record Eusexua (“Girl Feels Good” might be my top song of the year); a welcome return of the interesting version of Justin Bieber on laid-back, groovy SWAG (no, I will not speak about SWAG II here); the throbbing beats and soaring vocals on Sudan Archives’s The BPM; and this year’s rich solo projects from both The National’s Matt Berninger and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. Shoutout also to Bad Bunny, Ethel Cain, Oklou, Alex G, and The Beths. (Neither of the latter two matched the heights of their respective 2022 albums, but I enjoyed this year’s offerings nonetheless.)

If you’re waiting for me to mention Geese and Cameron Winter, I’ll say I have genuine respect for what the kid is doing—enough to drop a chunk from both albums onto the playlist, though if I had to choose, I think I prefer the full band—but I have a hard cap on for how long I can truly enjoy listening to his warble. I don’t really get the Addison Rae thing more generally but “Diet Pepsi” is a banger. In the Taylor Swift department, I only wanted to drop a few songs from major disappointment The Life of a Showgirl on this playlist—most happily ”Ruin the Friendship,” the only track that maintains the tight, picturesque storytelling that originally had me blasting her music while cleaning my room in middle school—but I would like to present the “Taylor Swift Song of the Year award” to Lady Gaga for “How Bad Do U Want Me,” which uses a remarkably Swiftlike melodic pattern to great effect. As my friends and I used to say about Swift’s “Cruel Summer,” “How Bad Do U Want Me” has those chemicals they put in Doritos to get you to keep eating them. At least someone is putting them to good use!

This rec also serves as my farewell before I head off on my sabbatical at the start of next year. I’ll see you all in May 2026!

Daniel May (publisher): The Voice of Hind Rajab is hard to “recommend.” It’s difficult to think of another movie that I found as physically painful to sit through; I ended up watching most of it with my jacket pulled halfway over my head, as if the padding might shield me from its blows. I left feeling drained and dizzy, but knowing that I had seen a very, very special film.

The entirety of the movie is set in the Ramallah offices of the Red Crescent, the organization that provides emergency health services in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, and the close quarters evoke a claustrophobia more familiar to the stage than cinema. When I initially heard the conceit—the audio from Hind, a six-year-old girl trapped in a car in Gaza, is the actual recording, while actors portray the aid workers that received the call—I thought it sounded formally inventive but practically awkward. I was wrong. The effect is intensely intimate, forcing the viewer to sit with the workers of the Red Crescent for 89 torturously long minutes.

The film has a narrative structure so simple that, were it not based on well-documented events, would seem contrived. Omar, the weary and dogged aid worker who receives Hind’s call, is responsible for keeping her on the phone while his colleague and supervisor Mahdi arranges for an ambulance to retrieve her. While the ambulance in Gaza is only a 12-minute drive from Hind, Mahdi will not authorize the pickup until he has clearance from the Israeli Ministry of Defense that the ambulance will not be fired on. As the hours go by and Hind becomes more scared, desperate, and despairing, Omar unravels. He grows increasingly impatient with Mahdi for not simply directing the ambulance to go to Hind, furious at his deference to the Israelis. His increasing rage makes him a poor source of support for Hind, and his colleagues Rana and Nisreen step in to try and offer words of calm to the girl.

Initially, our sympathy is with Omar, who sees Mahdi as overly obsequious to the same army killing his people. “You’re the reason we’re occupied!” he screams at Mahdi. But when Mahdi points to the wall of photos of the many ambulance drivers already killed in Gaza, telling Omar that if he loses another he is going to quit the job, we see the grief behind his stubbornness.

The hours go on. Omar loses himself, collects himself, loses himself again; Nisreen and Rana talk to Hind about daycare, her favorite colors, anything at all. As they assure her that help is on the way, her voice grows thin in weakness, exhaustion, and fear. It slowly becomes clear to Hind that she is alone and dying, and as much as Rana and Nisreen try to tell her the ambulance will be there soon, in time the six-year-old stops believing them.

You know how the story ends. After almost four hours, the ambulance was finally granted clearance, and several yards in front of Hind’s car it was shelled by a tank. Both of its drivers were instantly killed, and12 days later Hind was found dead in her family’s car.

If all this sounds crushing to watch, it is. But what flattened me was not primarily the awful killing of Hind, whose story is well known and whose voice has already been heard by millions. Nor was it the portrayal of the mundane mechanics of genocide; the bureaucrats that refuse to offer the ambulance authorization are never shown, the tank that kills the drivers and attacks Hind’s car is heard but not seen. The film is not ultimately about the victims or the perpetrators of this genocide, but about its witnesses. In the hands of director Kaouther Ben Hania, the offices of the Red Crescent in Ramallah are a crucible in which the agony of those witnesses can be revealed in ferocious intensity. Her relentless focus is on four that happen to have more power to help than most but, in the end, have far, far less power than they need.

In the reflections she offered after the screening I saw, Ben Hania noted that narrative film is above all an emotional medium, and in bringing us so close to those aid workers, the movie demands that the viewer sit with the agonizing feeling of their powerlessness. As specific as the story is, the experience calls up in acute form a feeling that I have often found myself trying to keep muted these last two years, just to get through the days. The film is about the dedication and efforts of Omar and Rana and Nisreen and Mahdi, but like them we’ve all had some power to stop all this killing—and ultimately, not nearly enough. Ben Hania asks that we see the toll it took on them, and face the toll it takes on us.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The US war crimes in My Lai, encompassing the slaughter of hundreds of Vietnamese villagers, were first revealed by journalist Seymour M. Hersh. Hersh also played an essential role in uncovering the Watergate scandal, working in parallel to Woodward and Bernstein. Hersh laid bare the many crimes of Henry Kissinger, and, much later, the monstrous acts of torture at Abu Ghraib.

In their new film Cover-Up, screening in theaters for a week and then streaming on Netflix, Laura Poitras and Mark Oberhaus take us through Hersh’s work in all these cases in detail. The amazing work he’s done, the skill and luck that have made him a redoubtable figure in the world of muckraking journalism, are presented with great clarity. Hersh has never hesitated to go after the US government, and particularly the military, when they throw off the shackles of law and decency. He has contributed to the firing of malefactors within the government, like the head of the CIA’s counterespionage division, James Jesus Angleton. His astounding work on My Lai revealed the vileness and callousness of military justice—which released the leader of the slaughter, Lt. William Calley, from his life sentence after just three months—as well as the moral degradation of a swath of the American public, which viewed Calley as a hero and a martyr.

But Hersh has also been guilty of sloppiness, as in the case of a fake Marilyn Monroe-JFK correspondence which, in his hunger for a scandal, fooled him entirely, seriously wounding his credibility. There have been other incidents of sloppiness that get scant attention in the film. But Cover-Up doesn’t shy away from showing Hersh to be what any regular reader of his work would assume to be the case—an egomaniacal, temperamental, nasty piece of work. The egocentrism that bursts forth on every page of his writing also appears in every scene of this film.

Though his difficult youth as the child of Jewish immigrant in Chicago is dealt with well, the rest of his personal life is a blank. His wife and children must have chosen not to appear, and he speaks little about them. He is petulant, prickly, and curt with the filmmakers. We learn that it took 20 years for Hersh to agree to do this film with Poitras. There are moments when she must have regretted his consent.

Cover-Up, precisely because of these unpleasant moments, feels like an accurate portrait of Hersh and not a hagiographic suckup. It’s not a muckraking film on a muckraker, but it is an honest film, portraying its subject warts and all.

In a recent opinion piece in The Forward, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove grappled with his feelings of defeat after the election of Zohran Mamdani. He had reason to despair. Not only had his eleventh-hour intervention failed to sway the results, but a substantial minority of Jewish voters had, in his view, betrayed their people by casting their lot with the pro-Palestine candidate. Searching for a way to articulate his faith in enduring Jewish unity and common purpose amid clear schism, he quoted a foundational biblical story: the binding of Isaac by his father Abraham. The very act that “defined Abraham as a hero of the Jewish faith,” Cosgrove explained, was so horrifying to his son that Isaac never speaks to him again. Yet Isaac, upon maturing, returns and re-digs the wells that his father dug—a metaphor that Cosgrove finds “worth meditating on.”

There is something troubling about Cosgrove’s invocation of the binding of Isaac: For Cosgrove to be Abraham, he must divest himself of moral agency. He must act like our forefather, driven beyond ethics by a dimly remembered divine command, with no regard for the voice of compassion that, in this crucial biblical moment, beseeches him to stay his hand. Meanwhile, the son who Cosgrove analogizes to leftist Jews returns to the fold with no need for his father to take accountability, or for any process of reconciliation.

Perhaps our current schism is better understood by turning to a different narrative of familial relationship in Breishit: the story of Joseph and his brothers, as it plays out in this week’s parshah, Miketz. The parallels in this story are more fruitful in a number of respects, including, to start with, the nature of the relationships. Though Cosgrove exhibits a father’s anxiety as to whether his children will follow in his ways, our present situation is really more of a sibling rivalry: a struggle over competing visions for a shared enterprise, over who will have the power to interpret an ancestral legacy. The sons of Jacob face several questions: Will we inherit together, or devolve into factions? Will leadership be shared or held by one brother alone? And—as in previous generations—will anyone get cut out?

From the perspective of his brothers, Joseph’s answers to these questions were alarming. He was more concerned with being right than with being nice to anyone—accusations leveled against many anti-Zionist Jews. So they not only banished him, but left him trapped in a well with no water. A classic midrash adds a metaphorical meaning, playing on a Rabbinic association between water and Torah: A well with no water, the midrash explains, is a well with no Torah. Joseph, cut off from his father and community, has no source of Torah. This has been the experience of many anti-Zionist Jews, including those who have lost jobs, been excluded from centers of communal life, and even been alienated from their families.

But the story of Joseph and his brothers is perhaps most relevant because of the model of reconciliation it offers—the only successful family reconciliation in the Book of Breishit. Of course, many anti-Zionists would resist the analogy on these very grounds. Who says we even want reconciliation? This “family” of mine has committed an unforgivable crime! But Joseph’s decision to keep his family together might offer us insight into the conditions required for us to make a similar choice. Crucially, Joseph saw genuine accountability and change from his brothers. Unlike Abraham, they never lay claim to divine mandate, and thus never absolve themselves of responsibility for abandoning Joseph. They face the reality of their past sins, understanding their suffering as a consequence. They also take risks to defend a family member, even one who is different and threatening to them, demonstrating that they have learned to prioritize morality over political power, allowing Joseph to recognize their honest commitment to change and make amends. Similarly, the brothers come to understand that Joseph had correctly understood the stakes of the forces against them: Joseph foresaw that bleaker times were coming, that the years of plenty and ease at the heart of empire were running out, and understood that shared survival must take precedence over sustenance of old grievances. Even while playing the stranger, he is careful with his core obligations to family, refusing payment for the bread of their subsistence. The brothers, in turn, are forced to recognize the power of his political vision, in which his family’s survival is bound up in institutions of common good.

The mistrust that Zionists harbor against their anti-Zionist siblings is that we will turn against them, that we will let them be devoured by the Jew-hating mob, while proclaiming they deserve it. But in the last act of the Book of Breishit, we find genuine rapprochement, from a majority ready to take responsibility for their sins, and a minority who chooses to stay, who neither renounces nor abandons. The brothers live side-by-side in Egypt for the rest of their lives, sharing a common fate, however dark. As our world grows bleaker, we can learn from this model of coming back together without foregoing a moral reckoning, or forgetting the disputes and pain that lie between us.

Avi Garelick is a researcher and organizer based in Washington Heights, New York.