Finishing one year, starting another

Thoughts for that in-between time, and for 2026

It’s finally the end of a year I’m certainly glad to see the back of. Hooray! In honour of 2025 ending, I am going slightly off-piste with my final newsletter of the year. Thank you in advance for humouring me. And happy new year to you all….

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Just look at that light in the clouds over the sea in Larnaka, Cyprus

It’s the time of year where things wind down before they wind back up, and where people convince themselves that they are somehow starting anew. Officially, I have two such moments every year, given that I celebrate two separate new years, one Jewish, the other Gregorian. Rosh Hashanah is sometime in the autumn, changing every year depending on the moon, so only a few months separate my two main markers of renewal.

I have various unofficial new beginnings, however. In no particular order, I think these are: my birthday, the first truly warm day of the year, the start of spring, the purchase of a new book, finally going for a haircut. It seems that I am constantly looking for excuses to believe that I am beginning again.

I arrived at today’s near-renewal point somewhat in desperation, however, because it has been a year of consistent bad news and general disappointment in mankind. As an Israeli, the horrors in Gaza fill me with shame, as do the actions of the Israeli army and government in the West Bank. Just before the year ended, a Gisèle Pelicot-type case was reported in the UK. In Britain, as in the US, an extreme and anti-migrant politics has moved from the fringes to the mainstream, and the rights of transgender people are under attack.

Where are the good, wise leaders who will save us? Justin Trudeau is busy loving Katy Perry. Barack and Michelle Obama are busy making sure we all know they aren’t getting divorced. Keir Starmer is busy refusing to look reality in the face. At least in New York we have Zohran Mamdani, a politician who seems like an actual human being who actually believes in something, and AOC (who responded with grace (“I would stomp him!”) when asked this month if she would beat JD Vance in a presidential race, as some recent polling suggested). Mostly the adults in the room seem to be squirrelled away somewhere while the chaos of an illiberal tech bro billionaire-dominated internet age takes us all down with it. Down into the sludge of non-debate and AI slop and politics-by-meme. At least Lily Allen’s new album provided some catharsis.

One of the sub-plots of this period (though depending on your vantage point, it might be more of a main event) is the thing this newsletter focusses on, namely the backlash against feminist progress. After three years of taking notes on that here, it’s clear that, certainly where governments and politics are concerned, the backsliding of women’s rights, more extreme in some places than others (see, for instance, Afghanistan), remains a secondary priority to virtually anything else. But there are numerous other such sub-plots (again, main character or supporting, depending on your point of view), from the climate (2025 is thought to be one of three hottest years on record) to what currently passes for policy on migration. The days when Germany actually welcomed Syrian refugees seem almost quaint compared to the calls for remigration now in vogue as the AfD, and others of its ilk, make hay with public dissatisfactions.

Back to the topic of backlash, there is a disconcerting trend of mainstream media in the US holding debates over whether feminism has been bad for women, or work, or the world in general. Jessica Valenti has written an essay about this, which opens with the fact that CBS is holding a Bank of America-sponsored debate titled: “Has feminism failed women”. The implication isn’t that feminists have not fought hard enough for equality, but that the very aims of feminism were mistaken from the start. Valenti says she has declined numerous invitations to such panels recently “because to participate would be accepting the premise that our rights and humanity are up for debate. Once you concede that it’s reasonable to ask whether women’s rights are a good thing, you’ve already lost.” Something to keep an eye on in 2026.

Another thing living rent-free in my head of late is idea of things being “downstream from patriarchy”. Listening to an episode of my new favourite podcast last week (In Bed With the Right) about the Epstein files, one of the co-hosts noted that whatever Epstein and his numerous pals perpetrated, the sex trafficking of girls at such a scale, the horrific abuse, the fact that this kind of abuse is so common and so normalised in many ways—all of this is downstream from patriarchy. As such, such abuse is both unsurprising and utterly pervasive, as well as also practically impossible to actually eliminate from a society that is patriarchal. Since hearing this phrase, I have been looking around and wondering what I am witnessing or experiencing that is “downstream from patriarchy”. Another thought to stick with in the new year.

A final thought to end the year with is that, as my daughters grow older (they are pretty small, 4 and 8, but still…) I see their brilliance, their confidence and their freedom with themselves, and my heart breaks a little when I think about the many things that will conspire to undermine all of that. I can’t tell them any of this, of course, and I wonder whether, when they understand what it means to be a girl and a woman in this world, they will feel betrayed. So, one thing I resolve to do for 2026 is to give them all the space to be free now, before society edges in. And who knows. Maybe then they will be strong enough to change it more than my generation did.

So here’s to a new year of much more light, where the world wakes up to itself. In this spirit, here are some recommendations from my 2025 in culture (which has been brighter than the rest):

Music: Molly Drake | Book: The Empusium | Film: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles | Magazine: Oliver Sacks put himself into his case studies. What was the cost?