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.
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.
The additional beauty of the situation was that we were stretched way too thin — working on 5ish hours of sleep a night, working on planes, phoning editors from the car while getting lost in rural Alabama. Which is to say, I did not have time for the jealousy or self-flagellation that might have otherwise infected my brain (“How have I been doing this so poorly my whole career so far? How do I not know everything about interviewing people?”).
Anyway. Watch someone else do your job. See what you can learn.
Additional lesson: want to squeeze your shitty little voice in your head off to the side? Don’t give it ANY TIME to talk. (This only works for so long. But still.)
Go help people — At one point this year, I tweeted about having depression/anxiety and being on meds for them. I did so with mixed feelings — on the one hand, we millennials already seem to have busted through a lot of stigma around having mental health issues. And was I just looking for attention/sympathy? Ugggghhhh.
On the other…I dunno. Vulnerability is good for the soul, normalize the struggle, etc. etc.
After doing that, a person I follow/generally admire reached out to me asking how they should go about deciding what meds to go on, figuring out what works, and so on. And…I was so happy to help! I mean, I’m glad that I’ve made it to a place of mental (more or less) stability, for obvious reasons, but in addition, it gives that whole (long, shitty, ongoing) process more meaning that I can use it to help other people.
The point: share your struggles. Use them to help other people who are struggling.
While you’re at it, find some good places to donate — Donate to food banks. Get rid of medical debt. Fight malaria. Just give money to people. Go help someone.
Organize your audio — This is specific to radio people/other reporters with lots of audio, but I don’t care. Nothing will make you feel like more of a have-your-shit-together reporter than thinking, “I had some FANTASTIC audio from the 2017 Women’s March, and I need it *right now*,” and then being able to find it within MINUTES because you have saved AND properly labeled in an intuitive filing system. Hell yeah.
Backbends + screaming = mid-afternoon wakeup — Do you work from home? Do you hit a wall around 2 or 3 PM? Here’s what to do:
1) Get into camel or wheel pose.
2) Hold silently for a brief moment.
3) Scream.
It’s a better wake-up than an adderall latte laced with coke.
Headstands and long conference calls — Let’s say that you’re, hypothetically, doing several meetings per week that go on for quite a while and in which your vocal participation is only necessary for like 5-10 minutes. Is that a good time to practice your headstand? Also yes. You’re working from home, and you GET TO DO THIS.
Additional point: THIS DOES NOT MAKE YOU A BAD WORKER. Headstands require silence and concentration. You will hear more of the call while attempting to do a headstand than you would while doodling that same tulip you’ve been drawing since 3rd grade art class all over your reporter’s notebook.
Carve out your own spot — It’s why I make the Apartment 932 recordings and write my own long essays and do book reviews at various places. If you want to take up more space, do it instead of hoping that space will magically appear on its own/be granted to you (this goes triple for you ladies).
More importantly: Do the stuff you like to do. Then promote the living shit out of it.
THINGS I MADE FOR NPR
An Oral History Of How Barbie Lost The Presidency Yet Again — Mattel has released a Candidate Barbie in every election cycle since 1992. And yet, Barbie has yet to win. In what was by leaps and bounds my most unhinged work of 2020, I interviewed Barbie and her team to see why they think she has yet to be successful.
Throughline — “She Got Next” — I conceptualized this episode, on women who have run for president, and reported the third part of it, on former Colorado Rep. Pat Schroeder. This is some of the most fun I’ve ever had interviewing someone, and you can hear it in me cackling in the background while she talks. Come for the humor, stay for the bracing splash of ***phenomenally *** sexist 1980s-era NPR archival footage.
The final week of Elizabeth Warren’s campaign — I ended up covering Elizabeth Warren’s campaign closely for NPR, and was assigned to follow her from just before the South Carolina Primary through Super Tuesday. As fate would have it, those would be the final days of her campaign. I used that week’s worth of tape from interviewing her devoted followers to tell the story of how she lost. (NOTE: the article itself is good. But I recommend listening, because the voices really make it pop. If I do say so myself.)
How much did sexism affect the 2020 campaign? — It’s a huge question. It was really hard to tackle. I think I did it well.
Feminism’s many losses (and gains) under Donald Trump — It’s not often you get to do a retrospective that wraps together so much that it blows your hair back and makes you take a moment and go, “Fuck. A lot has happened.” But writing this piece did that for me…particularly the section where I lay out just a slice of the vast amount of gender-related news that we lived through under Trump:
There were #MeToo, Roy Moore, Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh. There was Lucy Flores accusing Joe Biden of behaving inappropriately toward her. There were still more women accusing Trump of sexual assault, pushing the total past two dozen, by some counts. There were a record number of women elected to Congress, and then the president telling "squad" members (all citizens) to go back to where they came from, and a congressman reportedly calling one of those women a sexist slur on the Capitol steps. There were new abortion laws and new Supreme Court decisions about abortion laws. There was the wait for justice for Breonna Taylor. There was coronavirus pulling women out of work. The administration rolling back health protections for transgender Americans. Democrats pondering "electability" as a record number of women ran for president and came up short. Kamala Harris becoming the first woman of color on a major-party presidential ticket. Trump calling Harris a "monster" after her recent vice presidential debate. And, of course, the death of a feminist icon. Confirmation hearings just wrapped up for Amy Coney Barrett — a woman whose abortion stances leave many feminists fearful.
Trump Has Weaponized Masculinity As President. Here's Why It Matters. — I’ve made masculinity in politics my Thing for a while now, and this is the culmination of four more years of that work.
Multiple people wrote about the different types of masculinity Biden and Trump embodied on the trail, but in this piece, I was getting at the reason all that matters — the way centering machoness affects economic policy (highlighting manufacturing and farming above all things, for example), foreign policy (cozying up to strongman leaders), and of course public health (Real Men apparently don’t wear masks).
THINGS I MADE ELSEWHERE
Apartment 932 — I’ve only made a couple, and I swear more are coming. But for now, there are two here (plus a silly thing I made early in the campaign, after attending some Bernie kickoff events).
What I Learned About Romance From The 2020 Presidential Candidates — If you didn’t read it a few weeks ago, read it now. Because I’m proud of it, by God.
What Will America Look Like When Millennials Are In Charge? — A book review for the Washington Post of Charlotte Alter’s “The Ones We Are Waiting For.”
THINGS THAT BROUGHT ME SOME LIGHTNESS AND JOY IN A DIM AND HORRIBLE YEAR
Children on Twitter: Specifically, British sheep-showing girl and the song of the year
Weird-ass videos: this list is still from 2019 but it’s just a fantastic rabbit hole to keep bookmarked
Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters: It is impossible to over-praise this album. Actually, same for Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia. Both are just damn fantastic.
The Great: Such a good and weird and smart and ridiculous show. Who knew imperial Russia could be so much fun? (Note: NOT for watching with your children around. Hoooooooooo.)
Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes du Mez — A deeply thoughtful book about the impact of masculinity on the politics and theology of white evangelicals. As a white lady who grew up…sort of half-evangelical (ELCA but with quite a bit of youth group and bible camp and so on mixed in), this book smacked me in the face a few times. In a good way.
NPR’s Tom Huizenga’s end-of-2020 classical list — His year-ending classical lists always make me happy. Do I love everything on here? No! I’ll be honest: Ades Conducts Ades is still confounding me. But my God, I love that this exists and that it challenges me every single time and usually gives me some incredible new writing music.
I leave you with my ridiculous New Year’s Eve 2019 photo I sent to my friends, from a lonely hotel room in Des Moines, where I was filing late-night news spots a month ahead of the Iowa caucuses. My phone recently resurfaced it in that thing iPhones do now where they bring up old photos you never really asked to see. Anyway, it made me feel a lot of things, but most importantly, it made me remember how daunted I felt at the start of 2020 — that too-quiet, climbing-the-huge-roller-coaster-hill feeling that comes at the start of every presidential election year.
Well, we did it. It’s over.
Cheers, and may we all feel comfortable in hotel rooms again sometime soon.