2020 In Review: Goodbye, Stale Hell. Hello, Fresh Hell.

Pour your bubbly and put on your ass-kicking boots and raise a toast. Let's do a year in review.

(Look. No gif encapsulates 2020, so here ^^^ is a fun one that pleases me. And who doesn’t like Ernest P. Worrell, amiright?)

OK, team. I’m not going to do the “fuck 2020, amiright?” thing, because (1) you’re doing that already, and (2) we’re all going to wake up tomorrow to a day that still looks … almost exactly like today.

I mean, year-ends are largely arbitrary. Our timekeeping systems are feeble attempts to impose a sense of order on a fundamentally chaotic and unfeeling universe. And anyway, enough of this “bye, badness of 2020!” fiction. 2020 cannot be conveniently boxed up and shipped away because the human-made calendar odometer is flipping over. Nothing has meaning.

So anyway now that I’ve killed your buzz, here’s a self-centered rundown of 2020 — what I learned and what I wrote and what got me through this year.

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THINGS I LEARNED

Watch someone else do your job — The most demanding reporting I did in 2020 was in the Before Times, during primary season. I was sent out to follow Elizabeth Warren around from just before the South Carolina primary to Super Tuesday, along with a producer (the excellent, excellent Nick Fountain from the Planet Money podcast). (Sometimes on reporting trips, we go out alone — I usually do — but when there’s a lot of tape to gather, events to cover, and live hits to do from the field, they send us out in teams.)

What I lost was the solitude of precious rental-car scream-singing time. What I gained was seeing Nick interview people, in a way that was much more informal and more disarming than my own interview style.

Here’s an example, of approaching people after they got through Warren’s photo line:

MY APPROACH: Excuse me, ma’am. I’m with NPR, and I’m doing a story on lorem ipsum dolor [trails off] …

NICK’S APPROACH: [bounds up to person] YOU GOT A PICTURE! Let us see!

His approach get these delightful emotional reactions from people that I was getting far more rarely. And thus a new skill was learned.