Socks, Geniuses, Gangsters
A few bright spots from 2025.
This summer I posted a short piece called There’s A Crack In Everything, That’s How the Light Gets In. It came out of a period of cultural vertigo, dark headlines, dissolving norms—and my stubborn refusal to let chaos have the final say, a posture that remains with me always.
This year I read a lot, I watched a lot, and I researched and wrote a whole lot (72 long-form essays and nearly 100 shorter-form posts). I also wandered down far more internet rabbit holes than I care to admit, getting mind-pilled across nearly the entire color spectrum, from red and black to green and even gold. I took on, delighted in, rejected, and discarded an enormous volume of data, media, entertainment, and information, some of it excellent, plenty of it decent, but most of it ill-conceived, poorly executed, or simply not worth the time it demanded.
Out of all of that, three works stood apart above the rest. The first — far and away my favorite discovery of 2025 — hit my emotional spot dead-on and had me smiling ear to ear. The second rearranged my thinking and left me stunned. The last one reminded me, mercifully, that seriousness doesn’t have to come at the expense of sharp, genuinely funny pleasure.
These were my three favorite pieces of pop culture in 2025.
It wasn't the music that hit me first.
It was the socks.
A group of kids—boys and girls—playing instruments together in their socks at a friend’s house after school, their sneakers kicked off in a loose pile just inside the front door. It was a detail I noticed immediately. Kids comfortable enough to settle in, and aware enough to treat someone else’s home with respect and care. Familiar, but not careless. At ease, but attentive. Before I'd heard a single note, something about the scene had set my heart aglow.
These kids were friending the old way. Not a single phone in sight. Zero performative cool. No anxious self-monitoring. Just that old, almost-forgotten rhythm of you and your peeps maxing around a shared obsession and getting better at it together.
Of course, this being a band, there’s the music and the playing. And it’s ridiculous.
The Graystones are an absurdly talented kid band from California, all 11 and 12 years old, playing real instruments with real commitment and dedication. They're not just “good for their age,” they're insanely good—actually great—for any age. They're Tight. Musical. Locked in. You can hear the hours they’ve put in, the choices they’ve made together, the care they take in getting things right.
Then there's the music they play. Covers of ’70s and ’80s tracks. Remember, these are 11 and 12 year-olds. In 2025. Rocking classics cuts from Fleetwood Mac, Toto, Supertramp, The Eagles, expertly and precisely with zero hint of irony, cosplay, or retro novelty. Just a deep respect for demanding, multi-layered songs that require everyone to show up and pull their weight. And they do. Every one of them. Repeatedly. To the point that several of the iconic original artists have reached out to thank them. Imagine hearing from Stevie Nicks or Don Henley or Bobby Kimball or Roger Hodgson when you’re in fifth or sixth grade.
What stayed with me most, though, wasn’t just the sheer, unabashed talent. It was the togetherness. The ease. The way the band clearly matters as a band. Music isn’t a backdrop here, it's the adhesive fuel that makes The Graystones the best kid band I've ever seen.
In a year that felt heavy and noisy and fractured, discovering The Graystones gave me uncomplicated joy.
If you want to understand what I mean, start here:
Watch The Graystones play Toto's legendary "Hold The Line"
Next up they jam Supertramp's equally legendary "Logical Song"
If The Graystones were the heart of my 2025, Amanda Gefter's Finding Peter Putnam was the soul — the thing that lit up my brain and made my stomach drop at the same time.
Gefter's story begins like a movie you don't realize you're watching. A quiet Louisiana street. A man on a bicycle headed to his night shift sweeping floors and cleaning toilets. A car swerves. Screeches. Then nothing. No news story. No obituary. No trail. As far as Louisiana is concerned, as far as the world is concerned, a janitor died.
Except he wasn't just a janitor. He was Peter Putnam. A brilliant physicist who moved in the orbit of Bohr, Wheeler, and Einstein, a mind many serious people described in almost reverent terms, a man who left behind thousands of pages of a theory of the mind that was decades ahead of its time.
Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching, a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s.—John Archibald Wheeler
What follows is part investigation, part pilgrimage, part intellectual thriller. There are clues buried in archives. Strange paper trails. An Ivy League alumni newsletter. A phone call to someone who can't believe anybody still cares. A moment of dark comedy when a Google search produces a very muscly, very orange man in a very small speedo, because of course it does.
It's at this point the piece turns from interesting to oh my god.
The door of a long-abandoned storage unit rolls up to reveal rows of filing cabinets, all meticulously labeled and ordered. Inside is an entire hidden archive of a man’s life’s work. Saved, protected, hidden from view, never revealed to the public. Gefter loads it into her car, drives it back to her hotel, and begins photographing page after page, thousands of them, as if she’s racing to preserve an endangered language before it disappears for good.
Putnam, we learn, may have uncovered something genuinely profound about the logic of mind, but he never managed to get his work into the world. Not because he lacked discipline or intelligence—quite the opposite—but because he built walls around it. He wrote in a private, idiosyncratic language his colleagues half-jokingly called “Putnamese,” and over time those walls grew higher. His life—money, secrecy, sexuality, his mother’s control, his own deep mistrust—became inseparable from the work itself. The ideas and the defenses braided together until they tightened into something closed and unmovable.
Yes, this is a story about consciousness, AI, and the nature of thought. But it’s also a story about obscurity. About how genius can disappear without a trace. About how history has a pernicious habit of remembering what gets published and promoted, what becomes popular and understood, rather than what’s actually true. It’s about the tragedy of a man who might have been a major figure and instead died anonymous on a dark Louisiana road, biking to work, his mind still largely unknown to the world.
And then, in one final, shocking twist, you learn that Putnam wasn't just brilliant, he was secretly very wealthy. He lived in near poverty by choice, sweeping floors, and left his fortune to land conservation. When the check arrived after his death, it was the largest single gift the Nature Conservancy had ever received.
The world got Peter Putnam’s money. It didn’t get his mind.
I finished Gefter’s piece feeling both grateful and unsettled. Grateful that the story exists at all. Unsettled by the question it leaves behind: how many Peter Putnams are out there right now—brilliant, isolated, unread—slipping through the cracks while the rest of us scroll past another thousand loud, shiny, utterly forgettable things?
If you care about consciousness, AI, philosophy, or the strange lives of overlooked visionaries, read this piece.
Give it time. This one deserves the slow kind of attention.
- MobLand (Paramount+)
The minute I saw Pierce Brosnan, Tom Hardy, and Helen Mirren headlining a big-budget Irish-British mob drama, I was in. I hit play expecting the usual prestige-mob meal. Grim people in expensive suits doing grim things in grim rooms to other grim people. It never occurred to me, not for a second, that it might be funny. Let alone hysterical.
MobLand is holy theatre — picture-perfect execution, razor-sharp writing, brilliant performances that are gleefully excessive in exactly the right way. This one has all the classic ingredients: crime families, betrayals, violence, power plays, the slow creep of dread.
Mobland is an exceedingly smart mob drama that takes itself seriously, but never solemnly. That's its magic.
The show understands that mobsters aren’t monks. These people are vain, petty, theatrical, extremely dangerous, and frequently ridiculous. They have egos, tastes, and grudges that long predate their children. They’re no more and no less human than anyone else, and because of that, the show gives them room to be darkly funny without draining the danger out of the room.
Plenty of shows can do tense. Far fewer can do tense and funny in the same breath without sliding into parody. MobLand pulls it off because the casting is inspired and the performances are outrageous and fully committed.
Brosnan plays his role like a man who knows he’s holding court even while ordering and committing an insane number of felonies. He's charismatic, dangerous, and just unhinged enough that every scene hums.
Hardy brings his trademark coiled-spring menace, but here he lets absurdity seep in at the edges. The micro-reactions, the barely contained contempt, the moments where you can almost see him deciding whether to kill someone outright or simply ruin their life in a surgically sadistic way.
Mirren is operating on her own frequency entirely. She doesn’t chew scenery. She dices it into neat cubes and serves it cold, every line landing with decisive, game-ending finality.
The result is a show that feels alive. Not “important.” Alive. The violence is real. The stakes are real. But the energy isn’t embalmed. It has swagger. Bite. And that rare quality where you can be laughing one moment and realize, a beat later, that you’ve stopped breathing.
In a year crowded with television that mistook gloom for gravitas, MobLand was a relief. It reminded me that darkness can still be entertaining, that sharp writing can still be fun, and that a show can be both high-craft and wildly watchable.
It was the perfect way to close out 2025. Some menace, some comedy, and three actors having an absolute field day.
A closing thought
None of these pop culture prizes explain the world. Nor do they fix it. But what they most definitely did for me in 2025 is remind me why I keep looking. Why attention still feels worth defending. Why beauty, intelligence, and craft continue to surface in unexpected places, even when the broader picture feels grim.
For a year as strange, complex, and difficult as 2025 was, that was enough.